Cemetery

It was 3 AM when my phone rang. I answered it with the slurred voice of one still half-dreaming. “Yeah?”

“Hey, I was thinking about our birthday this year. We’re turning 23.” My brother’s voice came through tinny with a telling echo.

“Are you driving somewhere? Dude. It’s so early or it’s so late . . . It’s something. What are you talking about?”

“I want to have it at the cemetery.”

“Uhhh . . . why?”

“I met someone and I want you to meet her.”

“You can’t just bring her round? I know you are into all that stuff but cemeteries kind of freak me out, man.”

“I know, I know. And no. She can’t. Will you just come? I’ll bring the drinks.”

That perked me up a little. Not the usual use for liquid courage, I thought, but it would do. “Alright. You know it’s not for another week though, right? Like you didn’t need to wake me up like this?”

“Yeah, sorry.” He was quiet for a long time and I almost fell back asleep to the road noise coming quietly through from his end. “I hope you like her. She’s not like the other ones.”

“Yeah, well. You’ve set the bar on the ground with them.”

“I know. Alright, hey, I’ll pick you up next week.” The call disconnected.

————

My brother fell in love easily and hard. It was difficult with him sometimes. There was something in him that made him think that he was hard to love so he’d take whatever scraps were sent his way. Even if they were ones that had gone bad. I hoped whatever was going on now was better for him.

On our birthday I wanted with some trepidation on my front porch. Nervous about meeting this new woman. Nervous about the cemetery. I went once a year on the anniversary of our parent’s death. Figured that was that obligation filled. I hoped he wasn’t planning to visit their graves today.

His truck rumbled up to the curb and we were off. He even more quiet than usual. He’d been animated when he called last week. I was looking to bring some of that back.

————

He pulled up to the oldest mausoleum in the cemetery, thankfully almost as far away from our parents as he could have gone. “She’s going to meet us here? I was kind of expecting her to be in the truck with you when you got here.”

“She’s here already.” He lit an oil lamp, which was odd, and went down the stairs into the underbelly of the building. I stood at the top of the stairs watching him descend, watching the light go with him and I ran to catch up so that I wouldn’t be left alone in the dark on the way down. He hit some kind of mechanism and another chamber opened. How much time did he spend here to have found something like this?

The room had it’s own lighting and it was well furnished. It was like stepping into another world. Everything looked old but it wasn’t rotted. Why wasn’t it?

When I saw her my heart stopped for a moment and then caught up with itself after stumbling around in my chest. I took a step back and ran into an end table and almost knocked it over. Then my brother was there, beside me.

“It’s ok. Here.” He poured me a shot of Jameson and handed it to me. I looked at him and then back at her and . . . I took the drink. He poured me another and I did it too.

My brother was talking again, which was good. Something to focus on. “Her name is Eleanor. She lives here.”

I pulled myself together enough to say, “Uh huh. And how long has she lived here?”

He cleared his throat. “About 200 years. Would you be ok if she talked now? We thought it might be best to introduce her in stages.”

I looked at her. She was beautiful. What had stopped me earlier was that she was translucent. Just a touch of it. She was mostly there, most of the time but she’d get lost in the shadow. My brother’s lantern shifted the light and parts of her faded and reformed when the light came and went.

When she did speak it wasn’t bad like I thought it could have been. I’d expected the rasp of the long dead but she was soothing. As soon as she spoke I felt safe despite everything. She was polite. She said, “I would offer you something to eat or drink only I cannot. It takes a lot of energy to touch things, to become real enough for that.”

I looked to my brother. “How? How is she here?”

He cleared his throat. “It was a curse. Nothing that was her fault. She got sick. Just before that, she gained the attention of a powerful man and his even more powerful wife cursed her as if she’d sought the attention.”

My brother didn’t normally talk like that. It was the story as she’d told it to him, repeated.

Then I asked, “And she . . .she’s good to you?”

He smiled then and it was like he was a kid again, happy just for the sake of it. There wasn’t the weight there that could hang so heavy on him. He didn’t need to say it.

I nodded and resolutely walked across the room and sat down across from her at the small table in the corner. My brother sat with us and I spent the night with them. Learning who she was and who they were together and in the morning I left wondering at a world where my brother had finally found kindness and safety but with a ghost.



Prompt ▼

Write a story or poem about a 23rd birthday party held in a cemetery. Why is it held there? What's going on?

Use GHOST as one of your genres.